Understanding is, after all, what science is all about - and science is a great deal more than mindless computation.Interview in 'Secrets of the Old One' in Berkeley Groks (16 March 2005).The trouble is that if I did that - and I actually didn't do it - the whole book fell to pieces really because the whole driving force behind the book was this quest to find out what could it be that constitutes consciousness in the physical world as we know it or as we hope to know it in future So I thought, well, that doesn't sound too hard, all I'll do is get out the scissor out and snip out all the bits, which have something to do with the mind. Well anyway, this book was written and various people commented to me and they said perhaps I could use this book for a course Physics for Poets or whatever it is if it didn't have all that contentious stuff about the mind in that.

There's something else going on and the question of what this something else was would depend on some detailed physics and so I needed chapters in that book, which describes the physics as it is understood today. Some years ago, I wrote a book called The Emperor's New Mind and that book was describing a point of view I had about consciousness and why it was not something that comes about from complicated calculations.The Large, the Small and the Human Mind (1997).They do not need precise definitions of the things they are talking about, provided they can say something about the connections between them. Well, why am I talking about things when I do not know what they really mean? It is probably because I am a mathematician and mathematicians do not mind so much about that sort of thing. There are two other words I do not understand - awareness and intelligence.Quotes Does life in some way make use of the potentiality for vast quantum superpositions, as would be required for serious quantum computation? Children are not afraid to pose basic questions that may embarrass us, as adults, to ask. 1.2 Fashion, Faith, and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe (2016).

Penrose consciousness